Archive for the ‘Junk’ Category

The award-winning Minecraft is a very popular PC game and also pretty addictive. It was originally created by Swedish programmer Markus “Notch” Persson, later developed and supported on different platforms and recently acquired by Microsoft for 2.5$ billions. (more…)

On Adafruit Learning System there are a lot of cool tutorials and this particular one is based on the Arduino Micro used to upcycles old Next keyboards:

Ladyada and pt had an old NeXT keyboard with a strong desire to get it running on a modern computer. These keyboards are durable, super clicky, and very satisfying to use! However, they are very old designs, specifically made for NeXT hardware, pre-ADB and pre-USB! That means you can’t just plug the keyboard into an ADB or PS/2 port or PS/2 to USB converter (even though it looks similar). In fact, I have no idea what the protocol or pinout is named, so we’ll just call it “non-ADB NeXT Keyboard”

In his blog, Marc from Robot Dialogs presents a very nice hack involving a IBM Selectric II typewriter: by means of an Arduino board and several solenoids, the typewriter can be successfully connected to a computer to emulate a vintage teletype.

The complete story can be found here, together with several videos about its development.

Everyday, a lot of spam inevitably arrives to our mailboxes, forcing us to lose time in discerning fake emails from good ones, so everyone agrees on saying that spam is frustrating and completely useless.

This is almost true, since Varvara Guljajeva and Mar Canet Sola have taken advantage of spam coming from the Internet (more specifically, those messages “donated” by Eindhoven people) to make a very creative art project: first, they have recycled spam to algoritmically create poetry and, then, they have sent the result to a properly Arduino-hacked knitting machine (Arduino has been used to emulate the typing of the commands required to load the pattern).

From the authors:

Concerning the concept, we are interested in bringing together digital culture and traditional handicraft. To be more specific, the idea is to experiment with the form and meaning of SPAM. We turn SPAM into a romantic, funny or even sarcastic poetry and present it in unusual tangible form as knitted garment. To be more specific, we call final result dysfunctional wearable, because it reminds a sweater but is not really a one. Like SPAM, our dysfunctional wearable does not have a purpose.

The result is really impressive and it has been presented at two exhibitions, at Eindhoven and Malmö. Several pictures of the events can be found here. More information about the project can be found at Mar and Varvara‘s homepages.

A weekend project by Adafruit to print announcements and discount coupons from the internet.

This project uses an Arduino Uno, an ethernet shield, a thermal printer (aka receipt printer) and a Staples easy button to print out the current discount percentages available at the tkts times square booth for Broadway shows.

The Twittertape Machine prototype from Adam Vaughan connects to his Twitter account via Ethernet, checks for updates twice every minute, and prints out a hard copy of any new Tweets without the need for printer ink.

Vaughan told us that the idea for the Twittertape Machine was born of a desire to have the kind of old stock ticker seen in movies sitting on his desk. After a lukewarm reception to his pitch from friends, he decided to make his dream a reality. Rather than sacrifice a rare original (like the Edison Universal Stock Ticker used for Ames Bielenberg’s Spring Break project), he opted to build his own replica version from some old brass clock movements, a wooden plinth and a glass dome found online.

It is powered by two AC adapters and is controlled by a network-enabled Arduino-style microcontroller running custom code in the base. The board checks Vaughan’s Twitter account every 30 seconds for new Tweets.

The little thermal printer hidden at the base prints the tweets on a cut-down thermal paper. An awesome product in an awesome demand!

From B-Reel’s secret laboratory comes a brain-bending experimental project utilising a number of cutting edge tech tools. B-Reel’s UK creative director Riccardo Giraldi led the development of the project, and you can view the explanatory video here, as well as some of the creative musings in a write up below. [...] There are few commercial devices that claim to safely read your brain signals. We ended up choosing the Mindwave headset from Neurosky for this experiment because of its unobtrusive design and its affordable price.

Pinball machine will automatically power up at the preset time each day and then resets to display the current time, the year, the time the alarm is set for and the date month/day. Then as long as the GPS has a signal the time will update once a minute for the rest of the day. At the time you would like to go to bed the Arduino will cut power to the game and it will remain off until the alarm time. Should you have a power failure in the night the machine will not lose it’s settings. If power is restored prior to the alarm time the machine will wake up as normal, otherwise the machine will wake up once power is restored.

If the game is powered on because it is not yet bed time and it is after the alarm time then at 12am, 1am or 1pm the game will do a full reset. This makes sure the clock hasn’t gotten off due to a stuck score reel, keeps the time in a 12 hour format and keeps the date display up to date.

Have a look at the “cool features” and “coolest features” in the instructables article